For the bureaucracy class I'm taking, I have to write 5 response papers about the reading throughout the course of the semester, so I decided to write one today in an effort to keep myself awake. I started the paper with a quote from the movie I hate most in the world: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
(I should note here that there are many, MANY movies in the world that I have not seen that I'm sure I'd hate more, and there are many that are certainly objectionable for moral reasons. But of the ones I have seen, this is the movie whose story line is my absolute LEAST favorite. The first time I saw the movie was with Chase, and we were the only two in the theater... I think that pretty much says it all.)
The paper I wrote basically compares bureaucrats to politicians and explains how many of the constraints on both are similar. I realized by the end of the paper that generally, people don't like bureaucrats because they perceive that they don't accomplish anything (or at least very little), and politicians are being put more and more into that category. Also I realized that it's less the fault of the people who work in the bureaus and government and more the fault of "We the people" that it is that way.
For instance, why can't a bureaucrat purchase a good, cheap computer like the rest of us? Because once a bureaucrat did, and you know what happened? The bureaucrat purchased a Mac, and Dell was ticked because Dell could have made the same computer "at less cost" but Dell didn't know that what the bureaucrat wanted was like what the Mac made. So l lobbied his Dell lobbies his congressman to pass a regulation that says that before the bureaucrat can purchase a new computer, the bureaucrat will issue detailed statement of what he wants, then Dell and Mac could both price what it would cost them to make it, and the bureaucrat would get a cheaper computer that did exactly what he wanted it to do. Sort of makes sense, I guess. But then you add in IBM and Gateway and Acer and Toshiba and all the other computer companies and the bureaucrat should REALLY get a heck of a deal, right? No. Because the bureaucrat will have to put out the statement of what he needs in the computer in June. By November he has the 10 bids back, but he can't just pick the cheapest one necessarily, because if the cheapest one is Mac and the cheapest one the last three times was Mac (which we all know in reality wouldn't be true, but go with me here), then it might look like the bureaucrat is favoring Mac over all the others. So the bureaucrat has to take it under advisement and build a case for why he's choosing HP this time instead of Mac although Mac was cheaper. By then it's February or March and the bureaucrat places the order with HP. HP takes 8 to 12 weeks to build the dang computer and voila! A year after he decided he needed the computer (last JUNE), the bureaucrat has his computer. But, now the computer is out of date because the specifications he published a year ago are old technology so he has a sub-par machine.... *sigh* If only Dell hadn't been a crybaby to his congressman.
So the point of the whole computer/paper/movie story is that I realized why the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is my least favorite movie. It's because the movie is a complete satire of bureaucratic government. Bureaucracy is frustrating in the real world and it's all our fault. Why would I want to see it exacerbated in a ridiculous satirical movie?
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